Betrayed by My Ex, Marked by His Alpha Emperor Brother novel Chapter 110

Chapter 110: Chapter 110

Kaelen’s POV

The knights lifted her like a broken porcelain doll.

Her head lolled backward. One arm dangled, fingers curled inward, nails split to the quick and caked with dried mud. The motion pulled a sound from her chest—not quite a moan, not quite a breath. Something between. Something that barely qualified as alive.

I watched them carry her and felt nothing.

That was a lie. I felt everything. But I had learned, in three days of searching, to build walls between what I felt and what I showed. An emperor does not crumble. An emperor directs.

"Careful with her," Cassian ordered, stepping closer to supervise. "If she dies before she talks, she’s worthless to us."

The knights adjusted their grip. The woman’s body shifted, and for one fleeting heartbeat, the angle of her jaw—the way her chin tilted toward her shoulder—

Elara.

The name exploded through me like a crack of lightning. I blinked. Looked again.

No. Just a starving woman. Just bones wrapped in pale, gaunt skin, covered in violent scratches and filthy rags. Dark bruises already marred her fragile throat. The shape of her face was wrong. Too hollowed. The resemblance was a trick of exhaustion, nothing more.

You’re seeing ghosts, Alex muttered. Even his voice sounded defeated. Flat. The fire that had burned in him since Elara’s disappearance was guttering down to embers. Every woman is her now. Every shadow. Every sound.

He was right. Recently, I’d stopped a supply wagon because I thought I heard her voice among the merchants. Before that, I’d nearly drawn my sword on a washerwoman whose silhouette had looked, for one agonizing instant, like hers.

Three days of searching. Three days of nothing. And now my mind was rotting from the inside out, conjuring her face on strangers.

"Move her to the carriage carefully," I commanded. "I want her alive for interrogation."

"Understood," Cassian responded.

The knights turned, carrying her limp form toward the vehicle.

Then, the woman made a sound.

So faint it shouldn’t have been audible over the rustling of the knights’ armor. So faint that no human ear could have caught it. But I was not human. And in the silence of those frozen woods, my ears caught it like a fishhook through flesh.

"...Val...erius..."

The world stopped.

Every thought in my mind went white. Then black. Then a red so dark and violent it obliterated everything else.

What did she say.

That was Alex. Not a question. A detonation. His presence erupted inside my skull like a bomb going off in a sealed room. My vision split. Human sight overlaid with wolf sight, the world going sharp and silver-edged, every detail carved in razor lines.

Driven by the bloodlust of my inner wolf, I crossed the distance in quick, furious strides. I reached down and my hand found her throat. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

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